First Wednesday’s April Salon will be held on April 4th, 2012, with the salon running from 6:30pm to 9pm. Photographers Alex Emmons and Steve Fitch will be presenting work. Fitch will show his work documenting motel signs, drive-in theatres and other reminisces of vernacular highway culture. His exhibition Highway Culture is currently on display at photo-eye Gallery. Emmons will feature work from her series House and Garden, a series of cyanotype images that record objects and plants in the ubiquitous, present-day backyard, currently on display at the Marion Center of Photographic Arts at Santa Fe University of Art & Design.

April 4th First Wednesday Salon Artist Bio:

Alex Emmons grew up in rural upstate New York, near the village of Middleburgh and close to the Catskill Mountains. She received her Bachelor of Arts at Denison University in 1996 and Master of Fine Arts in Photography at Arizona State University in 2005. As primarily a lens-based artist, Alex’s creative research incorporates photo-media for its various outcomes. Conceptually she surveys objects and places related to domestic space and being away from home. Alex recently moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she serves as a member of the Photography Faculty at Santa Fe University of Art & Design. With this new move, Alex is busy gathering new maps to explore domestic patterns in the Great Southwest after a six-year hiatus. Alex Emmons’ work has been exhibited both internationally and nationally; most recently, she exhibited with students as part of the Pingyao International Photography Festival 2011 in Pingyao, China.

Steve Fitch is a photographer and educator who has been making photographs of the American West for more then four decades. As a boy, the scenes that he observed out of the window of his father's 1951 Buick fascinated him. In the introduction of Fitch's first book Diesels and Dinosaurs, he re-accounts memories of observing small towns, glowing neon signs and 18-wheelers roaming the highway. Fitch was also witness to the rise and fall of the drive in theater. All were experiences that molded his interests as an adult – leading to his visual studies of the highway culture of the American West and man's encroachment upon it.

Fitch holds a bachelors degree in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley (1971) and a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque (1978). Fitch’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is part of more than 30 public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of American Art and the George Eastman House. Fitch's many awards include three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Eliot Porter Fellowship.